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Telsa really should aspire to Toyota levels of efficiency, but you also have to account for the fact that Toyota has had decades of experience as well as a stab

Telsa really should aspire to Toyota levels of efficiency, but you also have to account for the fact that Toyota has had decades of experience as well as a stable and long-term relationship with their parts suppliers. Stopping the line and reconfiguring that plant in a Toyota plant is likely a minor rework for efficiency. But when a model and line and entire system is all new, a stoppage might not be a small rework despite best efforts to have arranged for it to be so ahead of time. Even the timeline and difficulty to setup a new Toyota plant vs a new Tesla plant aren't really comparable, because Toyota also has and excellent and stable set of design practices and supplier relationships. If two to three years from now, the rework ratio hasn't dropped considerably then Tesla is doing something wrong, but right now I think it's understandable that Tesla is just getting on it's legs wrt truly mass production. You always have to learn new things at each order of magnitude of production - even with products and methods that have been successful at the previous production level.

xkjkls 8y ago
The problem here seems to be that they seem to be striving for significantly short term goals, like meeting production targets, rather than really doing the work change the entire system and culture to one that would focus more on quality. That doesn't really bode well for their future if they consider their current production rates that imminently important to their success.
falcolas 8y ago
A thought: We're at a point in time where Toyota employees and management (and many other manufacturers' employees and management) have that experience. This experience is not something that has to be learned with every new iteration of the car production line - it's something that can quite literally be bought. The question that follows on: What internal process has prevented that experience from being bought? Instead Tesla seems to have opted to gain that experience from scratch at great cost to investors (and consumers).
- digikata 8y ago
  Some expertise can be bought, but some of the support is built over time, intrinsically outside the factory into the overall Toyota system. But ironically, thinking one can just buy an expert is to apply the same short-term mentality to the process that Tesla is accused of misapplying to product. When Toyota first started creating their own US factories, they took the steps of shipping floor employees in the US to japan a few at a time and working for weeks of training each class. When other auto companies tried to replicate Toyota processes in their own factories, it didn't help yield in the factories in many cases because often the input supplies needed so much rework. And then they had problems changing suppliers configurations because those relationships were contentious, and not of the nature of Toyota to it's suppliers. When you're trying to stand the whole system up at once, it's not just a matter of "don't write bugs" in one part of the final assembly. When Boeing reworked it's production design process for the 787, they had years of production problems to re-iron out, despite having years of great process experience previously.

xkjkls 8y ago

The problem here seems to be that they seem to be striving for significantly short term goals, like meeting production targets, rather than really doing the work change the entire system and culture to one that would focus more on quality. That doesn't really bode well for their future if they consider their current production rates that imminently important to their success.

falcolas 8y ago

A thought: We're at a point in time where Toyota employees and management (and many other manufacturers' employees and management) have that experience. This experience is not something that has to be learned with every new iteration of the car production line - it's something that can quite literally be bought. The question that follows on: What internal process has prevented that experience from being bought? Instead Tesla seems to have opted to gain that experience from scratch at great cost to investors (and consumers).

digikata 8y ago
Some expertise can be bought, but some of the support is built over time, intrinsically outside the factory into the overall Toyota system. But ironically, thinking one can just buy an expert is to apply the same short-term mentality to the process that Tesla is accused of misapplying to product. When Toyota first started creating their own US factories, they took the steps of shipping floor employees in the US to japan a few at a time and working for weeks of training each class. When other auto companies tried to replicate Toyota processes in their own factories, it didn't help yield in the factories in many cases because often the input supplies needed so much rework. And then they had problems changing suppliers configurations because those relationships were contentious, and not of the nature of Toyota to it's suppliers. When you're trying to stand the whole system up at once, it's not just a matter of "don't write bugs" in one part of the final assembly. When Boeing reworked it's production design process for the 787, they had years of production problems to re-iron out, despite having years of great process experience previously.